Property talk:Emigration date-approx
Migrations Just wondering - will there be "Immigration date-approx" too? People whose journey took 3 months could use one. Easily a different year. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:02, 15 May 2009 (UTC) :Yeah. Figure that all the standard fields for any event are also available for all others. :Related question you didn't ask but is implied by the term shift from emigration to immigration in your question. Maybe we shouldn't call it either. That is, Immigration from country is the same as emigration from country, right? Plus, that only covers one kind of journey- those which span country boundaries. How about the more general term "Migration"? Then, we'd just say "Migration from X" where X may be any of the location fields (street-address, locality, "state", country, coordinates), and then "Migration to X". That scheme is generalized so we can cover folks moving inside of countries- like the westward expansion in the 19th century US, or just moving from one to another province as part of a change of employment. If the from and to locations cross country boundaries, then it takes on the specific meaning of emigrant/immigrant, but if we want to know that specifically, we can detect that now via a concept query. : Does that seem right to you? I haven't thought of it much. I vaguely recall some "category correctness" discussions on wikipedia or commons that had some points that I thought were good at the time. I just don't remember what they were. Nothing to lose sleep over of course, because we can tweak things around as we learn what does and doesn't work. We can always change this sort of thing around since we are just starting out and can easily convert from one to the other before people get set on it being one way. After a few years are passed, it will be more difficult to change, so we should probably make sure we get these sorts of structural questions sorted in the next year or two. If you have any thoughts let me know. At this point I think "migration" makes better sense now that I think about it. -[[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 17:23, 15 May 2009 (UTC) ::If we are going to have only one, then it should be "Migration", for at least two reasons you stated or implied. Our categories reflect that now - where both origin and destination are in the page name, the term is "Migrants from ... to ...". But because you get migrations that take more than a few days you should be wanting to let migrants have emigration and immigration dates, as I mentioned. All of my known immigrant ancestors from UK to NZ or Oz took several months. The family who migrated from Delaware to the Netherlands may have taken less time, but that was before steamships too. The migrations from New England to the Mid West took a while. Knowing when someone started such a time-rich journey will be a less than satisfactory guide to when the person arrived and was therefore able to get married or produce children or die at the destination. So let's have all three words, please, though you may not attach exact dates to "Migration". — Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:41, 16 May 2009 (UTC) :::Agreed. :::Interestingly, Google earth and the other virtual earth applications are including time spans in their interface language ({{wp|Keyhole Markup Language|"KML"]]), and further, points along a path may be designated. This will be an interesting data type and one of the fields will be for an uploaded KML or KMZ file. You probably can't run google earth on a low bandwidth connection, but next time you are on a fast computer, check out this one for the Donner Party. One thing that can also be done is define a path for flying over the path in a kmz file too. It's a cool thing- don't know how many people will use, but it is definately a neat way to visualize not just migrations, but the locations of a relative during their military service, etc. -[[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 20:33, 16 May 2009 (UTC)